In honor of International Women’s Day this year (today) I looked up research on the intersection between women’s health and religion. Of 22 articles over a third of them dealt with abortion issues, contraception, and genital mutilation. Twenty-two articles showed up in the last three years in a Medline search. Parameters included journal articles with the word “women’s” in the title and “religion” somewhere in the article.
It seems that the intersection between the traditional medical system and religious communities are heavily focused on the pelvises of women but the issues are not simple.
As one of the author’s, Elizabeth W. Patton said in “How Does Religious Affiliation Affect Women’s Attitudes Toward Reproductive Health Policy? Implications for the Affordable Care Act” that “Supreme Court cases challenging the Affordable Care Act (ACA) mandate for employer-provided reproductive health care have focused on religiously based opposition to coverage. Little is known about women’s perspectives on such reproductive health policies … Respondents self-identified as Baptist (18 percent), Protestant (Other Mainline, 17 percent), Catholic (17 percent), Other Christian (20 percent), Religious, Non- Christian (7 percent) or no affiliation (21 percent) … Recent religiously motivated legal challenges to employer-provided reproductive health care coverage may not represent the attitudes of many religious women. Recent challenges to the ACA contraceptive mandate appear to equate religious belief with opposition to employer-sponsored reproductive health coverage, but women’s views are more complex.”
Several article focused on ways to use religious community networking to support women in creating healthy lifestyles. “Many rural health resources are linked to community churches, which are often well attended, especially by rural women. We used interpretive phenomenology and the photovoice method to understand how the church influenced health promotion for rural women, whose health is often significantly compromised compared with the health of urban women.” Researchers concluded, “Implications included reframing religious places as health-promoting and socially inclusive places for rural women.”
In another study, this time in Canada, researchers noted, “The rural church may be an effective health resource for rural Canadian women who have compromised access to health resources.” Robyn Plunkett and Beverly D. Leipert found that an extensive literature search revealed that religion and spirituality often influence the health beliefs, behaviors, and decisions of rural Canadian women. “The church and faith community nurses may therefore be a significant health resource for rural Canadian women, although this phenomenon has been significantly understudied.”
One article on women’s heart health was particularly interesting: “Spirituality has been associated with better cardiac autonomic balance [automatic health function related to the nervous system], but its association with cardiovascular risk is not well studied. We examined whether more frequent private spiritual activity was associated with reduced cardiovascular risk in postmenopausal women enrolled in the Women’s Health Initiative Observational Study. Frequency of private spiritual activity (prayer, Bible reading, and meditation) was self-reported at year 5 of follow-up. Cardiovascular outcomes were centrally adjudicated, and cardiovascular risk was estimated from proportional hazards models.” They concluded in “Frequency of private spiritual activity and cardiovascular risk in postmenopausal women: the Women’s Health Initiative,” in the Annals of Epidemiology, “Among aging women, higher frequency of private spiritual activity was associated with increased cardiovascular risk, likely reflecting a mobilization of spiritual resources to cope with aging and illness.”
Noting that not all studies agree with this outcome researchers commented,” In previous population-based studies, more frequent worship participation or, among Jews, adherence to orthodox practices and teachings were found to be associated with a reduced cardiovascular risk.”
It is a chicken and the egg situation. Did the increased spiritual activity cause the increase in cardiovascular risk? Or did the spiritual activity result from a great need for health?
In giving possible explanations, researchers said, “We cannot rule out the possible contribution of survivor bias (e.g., women with lower levels of private spirituality activity not surviving long enough to be included in the current analysis) to our findings.”
Life is so wonderfully complex for women, men, children, and all living creatures. Let’s celebrate life.
